Study shows less global warming impact on Iowa, midwest

An Iowa State University study on global warming finds that Iowa and some of its neighbors are bucking the warming trend. Professor Gene Takle says they’ve made that discovery using a detailed regional model of the climate in the U.S. He says they generally expect that winters throughout the U.S. will be warmer. He says they also believe it’ll be warmer in the summer, but were surprised to find that the increase in temperatures won’t be as much in the central U.S. as the rest of the country. Takle says there appears to be a hole in the climate warmup that starts in Missouri. He says they were surprised to find that the general pattern of warming that’s expected has an unusual pattern centered around the area of Kansas City where in the near term there’ll be less than average warming than over rest of the U.S. Takle says the trend spreads out to include most of the state of Missouri and half of the state of Kansas. Iowa is also part of the phenomenon. He says there should be a little spillover into Iowa where it looks like the warming will be a little bit suppressed. He says that’ll include more of southern Iowa than northern Iowa. Takle says a shift in the summer nighttime rainfall patterns is part of the reason for the variance in the midwest. He says some of the drier soils in Kansas and Missouri will receive more rainfall and the wetter soils will hold the temperature down during the day. He says more of the sun’s energy will go into evaporating the water, than heating the air. Takle, who is a professor of agronomy and geological and atmospheric sciences, says they aren’t sure what long-term impact the slower warm-up will have on Iowa and the other states. He says they haven’t explored all the consequences yet, and they don’t know how long the effect will last. He says their simulations go out until the year 2040 and beyond that they don’t know what will happen. He says it could turn around, or it could accelerate. The I-S-U Regional Climate Modeling Lab has been doing climate studies using models for about 10 years.